Are you struggling to make ends meet? Worrying about how you’ll pay rent? Disgusted watching live streamed genocides? Afraid to open your social media and see another cop or ICE officer murdering someone? Constantly anxious about climate collapse? Well, don’t you worry; pretty soon, you can take synthetic toad venom to solve all your problems!

At least that is what Eli Lilly is betting on after the pharmaceutical company bought AtaiBeckley for a $2.8 million upfront payment, with as much as $1 billion more in additional payments if certain measures are met. This is reflects a growing trend in which Big Pharma is betting on psychedelics.

The AtaiBeckley company is trying to bring psychedelic medicines to the mainstream. With its purchase, then, Eli Lilly is seeking to compete with companies like Johnson and Johnson, which is already in the space with medicines like the ketamine nasal spray Spravato. Atai’s leading drug is called mebufotenin, also known as BPL-003, which is a synthetic intranasal formulation of 5-MeO-DMT — one of the active chemicals with psychedelic properties naturally occurring in the Colorado River toad, also known as the Sonoran Desert toad — that they expect to use for treatment-resistant depression. It’s being tested in a Phase 3 trial for adults.

The purchase comes after the Trump administration’s announcement of fast-tracking the review of various psychedelics for mental health disorders. As someone in both the addiction and psychedelic spaces, I’m all for offering more access to these substances. So this is exciting, right? Maybe Trump is doing something good, and things are going in a positive direction for once? Not exactly.

To examine Lilly’s purchase, we need to use dialectics, putting it in its political context. First, we have ongoing, compounding crises of capitalism that are harming us all. Christian Angermeyer, the founder of Atai Life Sciences (Atai Life Sciences was founded in 2018 and became a publicly listed company in 2021. Beckley Psytech, a private company, was founded in 2019. In 2025, the companies combined. They’re headquartered in New York.), said a lot of this himself, referring to psychedelics as tools to help the masses accept their positions in society. “We need to have the discussion that we, let’s say the elite … we need to offer … these people … [in] the lower-level jobs … new jobs for them,” he said. “But at the same time, we need to make sure they want [their new jobs].”

And as the capitalist crisis deepens, Angermeyer proposes using psychedelics to help avert disruptions:

Psychedelics … generally help people to move forward into the future in a positive way. Psychedelics can enhance creativity and improve neuroplasticity — two essential abilities we need to be successful with [in] this transition, such as making ourselves open to new models of living and new job opportunities.

At the same time, while capitalism is always looking to expand, it faces a crisis of profitability and must look for new areas to exploit. What better way to do that than by commercializing psychedelic medicines and doing so inside the medical-industrial complex? That way, the capitalists can efficiently control or decide who can access these therapies.

Capitalism weaponizes drug policy — here, I mean both legal and illegal, prescribed and unprescribed — to maintain the working class as compliant. But for many, using substances is a way to escape the grind of everyday life. The pharmaceutical companies are complicit in this, turning this into profit. We see time and time again the many ways that capitalism seeks to reproduce itself while depending on varying levels of “alienation.”

As usual, under this system, it’s proposed that medicalizing, commodifying, and throwing therapies at people will solve the problems capitalism itself is fundamentally causing. Newsflash: it’s not going to work. The only way these therapies will have a real opportunity to benefit the public is by putting them under the control of the working class as a whole. More capitalism isn’t going to solve the capitalist crisis, period.

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